Rebecca Solnit - A Paradise Built in Hell : The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

Praise for A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

A New York Times Notable Book

Chosen as a Best Book of the Year by the Los Angeles Times , The New Yorker , the San Francisco Chronicle, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune , The Progressive , The Christian Science Monitor , and by Dwight Garner, daily book critic of the New York Times

A landmark work that gives impassioned challenge to the social meaning of disasters... Disasters, for Solnit, do not merely put us in view of apocalypse, but provide glimpses of utopia. They do not merely destroy, but create.... But the heroism of ordinary people is only part of Solnits study. The larger, and more troubling, questions that emerge in A Paradise Built in Hell concern our tendency to assume that people will not act this way and the official responses that come out of this belief.

Tom Vanderbilt, The New York Times Book Review

Thought-provoking... captivating and compelling... this writer of impressive versatility explores disasters and the goodness that can come to characterize them.... Solnit makes a convincing case for the sheer dignity and decency of people coming together amid terror.... [She] is unusually gifted at mixing dispassionate narration with fervent, first-person experience.... Theres a hopeful, optimistic, even contagious quality to this superb book. Rebecca Solnit sees in the aftermath of disaster a meaningful, if fleeting, coming together; the challenge is how to create similar centripetal force in devastations absence.

Los Angeles Times

In her far-reaching and large-spirited new book, Solnit argues that disasters are opportunities as well as oppressions, each one a summons to rediscover the powerful engagement and joy of genuine altruism, civic life, grassroots community, and meaningful work.... Full of moving transcendent acts by individuals, the book mounts a counterinstitutional riposte to the Hobbesian, social Darwinian world view of society as a collection of purely self-interested parties.

San Francisco Chronicle

Its also time to ask another question, which is what the future will actually feel like once we dont prevent global warming. That is, what will it be like to live not on the relatively stable planet that civilization has known throughout the ten thousand years of the Holocene, but on the amped-up and careening planet were quickly creating? With her remarkable and singular book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit has thought harder about the answer to that question than anyone else. And shes done it almost entirely with historyshes searched out the analogues to our future in our past, examining the human dynamics of natural disasters from the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 up through Hurricane Katrina.... Solnits argument, at bottom, is that human nature is not necessarily what we imagine it to be, and that even in very extreme cases, people are cooperative.... A Paradise Built in Hell is an 8.5 on the intellectual Richter scale. It opens a breach in the walls of received wisdom that one hopes many other thinkers will rush through.... This book is provocative in the best sense of the word.

Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books

Stirring... fascinating... presents a withering critique of modern capitalist society by examining five catastrophes... Her accounts of these events are so stirring that her book is worth reading for its storytelling alone.... [An] exciting and important contribution to our understanding of ourselves.

The Washington Post

The West Coast essayist and social critic Rebecca Solnit is the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesnt produce often enough. Its been fascinating to watch her zigzagging career unfold.... She has a rare gift: the ability to turn the act of cognition of arriving at a coherent point of view into compelling moral drama.... Solnits examination of elite panic in New Orleans after Katrina is her books most absorbing and eye-opening section.

Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review

This is a bracing, timely book. Nearly every other sentence in A Paradise Built in Hell will challenge what you think you know about catastrophes, starting with the idea that they bring out the worst in people.... Solnit argues that the extraordinary civility that follows disasters such as September 11 suggests that utopia is possible, if only we recognize how good life can be when the state breaks down.

Mother Jones

Solnits expansive argument about human resilience and community in times of crisis is bookended by accounts of two of the greatest natural disasters in American history: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 and Hurricane Katrina.... Though Solnit mobilizes decades of sociological research to support her argument, the chapters themselves move effortlessly through subtle philosophical readings and vivid narrations.... For all the darkness of her subject matter, Solnit emphasizes the importance of what William James called a civic temper, the drive not for individual survival but for meaningful community.

The New Yorker

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Solnit probes several notorious disasters and ends up with a series of contrarian insights that not only should change our understanding of people in crisis and strategies for aidthey also suggest that disaster communities provide a glimpse into the type of real-life utopianism that can extend beyond the immediate aftermath of catastrophe.... One could say that A Paradise Built in Hell is a treatise on natural disasters. One could also say it is a reflection on human nature, or a book about anarchy, state power, utopia, urbanism, and social change. That it is all of these is a genuine pleasure.

The Progressive

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First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2009

Published in Penguin Books 2010

Copyright 2009 by Rebecca Solnit

Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

Ebook ISBN 9781101459010

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE HARDCOVER EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Solnit, Rebecca.

A paradise built in hell : the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster / Rebecca Solnit.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-670-02107-9 (hc.)

ISBN 978-0-14-311807-7 (pbk.)

1. DisastersSocial aspects. 2. DisastersPsychological aspects. I. Title.

HV553.S59 2009

303.48'5dc22 2009004101

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.